“Why would you ever pay for anything when there’s free ways to learn?”

- mediocre programmer who spent 9 hours a day for 7 years learning to code...

(Great advice!)

🤔 kinda wanna ++ but not sure I understood it correctly.
Dilemma...

The scale of noise on the free content is the big challenge. So much paint by numbers and content that just isn't good.

You can / could learn for free no question and some folks do, but they've gotta either have a lot of time / frankly be pretty good about absorbing good content and discarding bad pretty fast. More so if they're starting from 0.

I am nowadays expecting to get a diploma (just for the paper) in Full Stack web development. It is really expensive and the course lasts for 7 months. I think they also expect you to already have some programming background.
When I got in my job after 6 months of learning Java from 0 (actually 2 months, and making projects for the rest) I learnt the basics in 1 month and by the end of that year (other 5 months) I had a working project up and running in production, being used by everyone in the company. I was 18 that year.
Also my only experience in a paid course (an Arduino one, many years ago) was horrible, so I am not paying anything to learn any coding any further.
If you cannot learn for free having all the material and resources (like people willing to help) there is in the internet today, you are a loser.

@NoMad the same.

Here tho, it’s called education. It somehow would feel weird to pay to study something when even uni is free...

It’s entirely possible to learn from free content if there’s someone else who learnt with free content telling you where to look and what to filter out.

The problem is with people who learnt from free content looking back in hindsight and oversimplifying how much crap they had to wade through.

That’s why we have a fuckton of programming forums.

@NoMad we could always discuss it... ;)

@c3r38r170 is it “really expensive” really? The college I went to now costs 52k a year just for tuition...

@hashedram someone to tell you... that sounds like a “teacher”

@c3r38r170 not everyone is such a genius as you. I guess Doctors should just learn by themselves too. There are totally free libraries. And if they can’t figure it out... we’ll, you know... they are stupid, right?

@sheriffderek no, doctors should go get their degrees. And btw, universally free education gets you pretty decent doctors, because munny doesn’t matter, brains do.

@100110111 is “free” uni free? That’s not how money works. Someone pays for it. We all pay for it. Time and equipment and food and housing and - everything... even when it’s called “free” is still paid for somehow. It’s not magic.

@sheriffderek you missed the point here. I’m glad to pay taxes if that’s what it takes to have something of a functioning society. At least anyone’s lack of wealth comes in the way when it comes to education or healthcare

@100110111 Maybe my joke was too confusing. This wasn’t a rant about how societies can work.

@sheriffderek Woah you were talking about coding, not an entire title. My examples where about Java and PHP, not about becoming a software engineer (I still am not and may never be).
You cannot "become" something for free (at least in the short term, you still can get a job and gather experience for years to be later known as a "skilled" or "competent" professional, even if you have no formal studies, something I've seen), but you do can learn whatever for free. Approximately whatever.

@NoMad Greatest compliment